The present disclosure relates generally to patient procedure scheduling, and, more particularly, to self-updating procedure duration estimation for patient scheduling.
Healthcare delivery institutions are business systems that can be designed and operated to achieve their stated missions robustly. As is the case with other business systems, such as those designed to provide services and manufactured goods, there are benefits to managing variation such that the stake-holders within these business systems can focus more fully on the value added core processes that achieve the stated mission and less on activity responding to variations such as emergency procedures, regular medical interventions, delays, accelerations, backups, underutilized assets, unplanned overtime by staff and stock outs of material, equipment, people and space that are impacted in the course of delivering healthcare.
Currently, clinical process decisions have historically relied on the art of understanding symptoms and diagnosing causality much in alignment with the practice of the medical diagnosis arts. In an ever-evolving environment, judgment and experientially-developed mental models are utilized by the healthcare providers to utilize the information currently at hand to make decisions. Presented with similar data, the decision made from one caregiver to another typically exhibits a variation. Presented with partial information, which is the byproduct of being organized in functional departments, specialties, roles and by the nature of having partial and/or current or dated information availability on hand—clinical process decisions vary widely and typically are locally focused for lack of a systems view upstream and downstream of the decision point.
As a hospital processes care plans on an increasing patient load, these variations in medical condition and selected treatment plans disrupt the schedules of doctors, nurses and assets such as rooms and equipment. If there is protective capacity in these schedules and staff, the providers of care can manage variation while maintaining care quality. When randomness and interdependencies exceed the ability to serve, care providers are forced to make choices amongst poor alternative options; some one or some thing is going to be bottlenecked or overextended. Delays, queues, overtime, burnout and emotional decision making characterize systems that are over-taxed or beyond their ability to perform.
Typically, each procedure in a clinical information system, such as a radiology information system, is assigned a static duration (usually in minutes) set by a system administrator that determines the default estimate length of the procedure and the amount of time the procedure takes up on the scheduling grid. This information is used during the scheduling process to record procedure duration in the schedule. This approach to scheduling can create either under utilization of resources or risk patient safety and/or service satisfaction due to over utilization of resources at least in part in view of the variations and complications discussed above.